The Itinerant Art Historian in a Contemporary Landscape

Welcome back art lovers. On Saturday 22nd October I visited the latest incarnation of the White Cube group of galleries in London's , Bermondsey Road.  White Cube three takes over a former industrial building and turns it into an austere and uncompromising homage to the cult of contemporary art.  The inside is bathed in harsh white light; no signs adorn the walls of this protestant-like temple to contemporary art, in an obvious attempt to break with the past, there are not even any signs to inform you where the toilets are.  As for the art in these cavernous white spaces, they will need a further visit, because it was now time to get across town to the next appointment with art.

Later on on Saturday I was to be found in the Gerhard Richter exhibition at Tate Modern; admiring Gerhard Richter's so called squeegee paintings that have an extraordinary effect of seeming as though they are other-worldly; as though there are many dimensions beyond just three within their bounds, especially those with interventions within them that seem to float over the surface of the images.  I am also admiring Richter's engagement with the past in this exhibition entitled Panorama; the word which itself derives from the Greek god Pan- the god of everything, indeed we still invoke this god in many other words such as pandemic and the orthodox image of God referred to as Pantokrator.  Richter's photo-realist black and white paintings of American bombers and his uncle Rudi confront the realities of war re-representing images that are at once art and also detached from their times.  But his painting of the 'Reader' engages with a more distant past reminding us of the ethereal light in Johannes Vermeer's (1632 - 1675) paintings and the anonymity in the work of the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864 - 1916). In all these paintings Richter achieves his own kind of anonymity, by inducing a photo-realist blur into his images that distances the viewer whilst also echoing the convention of the Dutch 'conversation piece' popularised by Vermeer and his contemporaries such as Pieter de Hooch (1629 - 1684) and Jan Steen (1626 - 1679). 

This inspiration from the past also reappears again as I look at Richter's photo-realist image of 'Betty', as one is again reminded of Hammershøi, but also of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's (1780 - 1867) iconic Bather of 1808.  But the image of Richter's daughter 'Betty' resides in a room where Richter also approaches the traditional subject of landscape painting.  But in Richter's landscapes we see again his obsession with blurring the image, which very much his signature. These images are wonderfully hypnotic and traditionally romantic; we the viewer look down of these lands again as outsiders impossibly floating over a seemingly imaginary landscape.  Also in this exhibition one comes across a painting of a single Candle, this image reminds us of the single point of light in seen in many of the works by the so called Masters of Light painters from Utrecht also known as the Caravaggisti, such as Hendrick ter Brugghen's (1588 - 1629) Concert of about 1626 and Gerrit van Honthorst's (1592 - 1656) Christ before the High Priest from about 1617. In the work of Gerhard Richter we do not see an artist that is trying to confound the viewer with the variety of his styles and media, indeed we see an artist that continues a tradition that stretches back to the very earliest stirrings of the Renaissance, that is the ability to work in a variety of media and a resoluteness not to work in the way that art historians would wish or image an artist should work.  The past is the future and the future is the past in the work of Gerhard Richter.